1:2:1 Podcast : Stem Cells

Leading stem-cell expert and Stanford professor of pediatrics Maria Grazia Roncarolo, MD, will be leading a session on stem cell and gene therapy at Stanford’s inaugural Child X conference this spring.

Irving Weissman, MD, director of Stanford's Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Biology, believes that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on unproven and potentially dangerous clinical treatments.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Francis Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health, shares his thoughts on the agency's stimulus funding, the not-so-easy task of securing additional funds for the agency's FY 2011 budget, and groundbreaking stem cell and cancer research being funded through the Recovery Act.

For the past eight years, scientists who wanted to use federal funds for research on human embryonic stem cells had to restrict their studies to 21 cell lines approved by the National Institutes of Health.

Irving Weissman, MD, the director of stem cell research at the School of Medicine says he is troubled by draft guidelines recently issued by the National Institutes of Health that would prohibit federal funding for research on stem cell lines created through a technique sometimes referred to as "therapeutic cloning" or somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Michael Longaker, MD, discusses the state and future of stem cell research. Longaker is the deputy director of Stanford's Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute and the director of the Program in Regenerative Medicine.